


A Swan Song

by rory_the_dragon



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Fix-it fic, Set after 3x11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-19
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-05 03:10:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1088910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rory_the_dragon/pseuds/rory_the_dragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Henry has...gaps, large smudges in his head he can't quite shift.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Swan Song

**Author's Note:**

> Basically this is an exploration of what would happen if you actually did take away someone's memories and try cram a whole new life into their heads. The operative word here being 'try'.

 

Henry has...gaps, large smudges in his head he can't quite _shift_.

He can't remember the name of his first pet, can't even remember if it was a hamster or a cat or a goldfish. He continually gets lost around Boston, even though he's been living here all his life. He doesn't remember how they found out about his deadly allergy to apples. His favourite Disney movie is Snow White and he can't remember the first time he saw it.

Can't remember the last time he saw it, either. He just _knows_ it's his favourite.

He's not popular in school. Invisible, really. So invisible that this last September, no one remembered him. He had to re-register, not even on the database somehow.

(His mom had had to throw a fit, insisting that he's been going to the school since first grade, dammit, how can they forget an entire kid?!)

The year between his eleventh and twelfth birthday is the strangest of his life. He can't remember ever being aware of the odd gaps in his head before this point, but now they're all he can see. There's a summer sunshine haze over his past, and he lies awake at night trying to pinpoint focal points. What flavour cake did his mom make for him on his eighth birthday? Where did he learn to ride his bike? When did his mom's old yellow beetle get the large scuff mark on the bumper they just can't buff away?

There are questions in his head that he can't answer, that his mom can't answer either. She looks sad when he asks, doesn't seem to realise it, but he stops asking.

He can't sleep, kept awake by the roar of the Boston city outside his window as if he hasn't been rocked to sleep by its lullaby every night of his life.

He turns twelve and he's desperately skinny, bony elbows and ankles, and there's not much he can do with that when the bigger kids at school decide they don't like the weird kid no one can remember who sits alone and reads through recess, through lunch, through most of his classes, too. His books always feel more real to him than anything, even fists to his ribs, and he tells his mom who does it when he comes home with blood on his lips and his pages because he doesn't know how to lie to her, but doesn't let her go after them.

It doesn't feel right, he thinks, letting his mom fight his battles for him.

That's another one of his gaps.

He's not popular, and he's okay with that, but he's alone more often than he isn't and Boston feels too big for him. He _devours_ his books. His books are one of the few things he can remember clearly, solid through all the smudges of his past. His books are rich, complex, beautiful worlds, more so than the one surrounding him. Sometimes the lady in the flat upstairs will find him sitting on the fire-escape, book of stories in his lap, kicking his legs over the edge, and she clucks at him until he comes inside, makes him a cup of cocoa and asks him to read to her.

She gives him a book of fairytales when he turns thirteen, and it might just be the best gift he's ever gotten.

At thirteen he's growing too fast, and starts getting nightmares. He doesn't understand them; flaming rooms with ragged curtains, purple smoke hitching and choking its way through his lungs. He wakes screaming every night for nearly a month, and doesn't understand why his mom's arms aren't comforting him, why he's calling out for a mom he doesn't have, arms that he's never felt.

Eventually, his mom soothes him back to sleep, but he dreams about impeccable red lipstick, sharp black curls, bright white teeth.

He hops a bus that summer, scorching in the Boston summer heat, follows it out of the city until something in his gut _twists_ and he gets off. He wanders the empty back roads for hours, burns his shoulders, the crown of his head, and doesn't know what he's looking for. But just as the sun's starting to set, his mom finds him in the middle of a field, just _knows_ where he is, and she's crying in the way she only ever cries, unknowingly, silent tears rolling over her cheeks.

Henry's been crying for hours now, and he doesn't know why, can't see past the gap in his head that makes a bunch of fields in Maine _ache_ in his heart.

"Something's not right with us," He says on the journey back, and his mom wraps an arm around his shoulder, one hand still on the wheel, and kisses his hair.

"I know, kid."

He turned thirteen thinking he was different. He turns fourteen _knowing_. There are still wires crossed in his memories, foggy days of his life he can't quite taste, blurs of dates and places, but he's not crazy, he's _not_ , his mom feels it, too, and it might scare her even more than it scares him, but she's never been one to back down from a fight.

...But there is no fight. Henry feels like they've been handed a quest with no map, a compass with no needle, asked to slay a dragon without a sword and with no indication of which direction to head. There's nothing they can do, but sit quiet in the kitchen, sipping at cinnamon hot chocolate and trading stories across the table. Real or not real.

 _The summer we went camping._ Not real. Neither of them can remember whether they hiked or drove, slept by a lake or at the top of the mountain.

 _You walked me to the school bus every day._ Real, they decide, but in their memories Henry's wearing a different uniform, and his mom can't stop looking behind her shoulder.

 _The wooden castle._ They both remember it, swinging their feet over the edges and playing with walkie talkies, but they search almost every park in Boston and can't find it.

He starts reading again, picks up the old fairytale book he got on his thirteenth and reads and rereads and rereads it, turning the pages out of a compulsion he can't fathom, reaches the end and flips back to the beginning. He reads it until the early hours of every morning, fighting sleep. Some days he thinks it's part of it, that if he just reads hard enough then he'll understand. Most days he just thinks that he's looking for a happy ending.

He has to get glasses, eyes strained beyond saving in his search.

"Put the book down, Henry," His mom finally says, doesn't call him kid, doesn't smile. "This is killing us."

"We don't even know who _us_ is."

His mom looks tired, bruises beneath her eyes, but she squares her shoulders. For a second, Henry can see her sword. "So let's find us."

They celebrate his fifteenth birthday in a diner down the street, sipping cinnamon hot chocolate because that's the one definite thing they have, besides each other. They start carving out memories, go camping for real this time, steadily coming back to reality for what Henry honestly feels is the first time in his life.

He realises he likes boys in an undramatic fashion, like turning your head at the right moment and catching a note of birdsong and realising it's been singing all along. He tells his mom and she takes him out for ice cream, ruffles his hair and hugs him until his glasses steam up.

His mom starts to date, never brings anything home except a foil swan from whatever restaurant for Henry. _Weren't a right fit_ she says, shrugs, if he asks, and he wonders what she's thinking about when her face goes slack, eyes unseeing. What half-recalled person she's remembering who _is_ her right fit.

Henry starts remembering, too. Nothing concrete. Images, maybe, or feelings. Polka-dot cardigans and hospital beds. Wooden swords and stables. Apple turnovers. It's like coming up from a deep sleep, or surfacing out of the water. His ears are still popped, sound and senses still muffled, but things aren't as dark. Not as all-consuming as they used to be.

He dreams of flying.

He remembers forests and firelight, pipes in the darkness. He wakes up sweating one morning, clutching at his chest and scrabbling at the skin, checking his heart still beats under his fingers. He feels a phantom _lub-lub, lub-lub_ , beat against the palm of his hand for days.

His mom comes home with a glass unicorn one day. Doesn't explain it, just stands it on the counter and looks at it.

They are remembering.

The swooping sensation of _too tall_ , inside a body that isn't his own, bones forged from starlight and the sky in his lungs; A boy with feathers in his hair, dead at his feet; perfume in his nose, tears in his hair.

"Regina," He says one day, and his mom's head snaps up.

"She loved you," She says.

"She loved me." Henry agrees, frowns. "Loves me."

 _She was my mom_ , he realises, doesn't understand it but it's true. He cries in his mom's arms until he falls asleep, and when he dreams, he dreams of a burning room, two voices calling his name in the darkness.

Henry turns sixteen, taller than his mom now, still all elbows and angles, geometric. He almost expects something. In all the fantasy novels, the quest always starts on the sixteenth birthday and Henry is ready to be his own hero.

Three months pass and Henry feels robbed, feels ridiculous. Then he opens the door to a girl with wild blonde hair, ancient eyes and a vial around her neck.

"Do you remember me, Henry Swan?" and his name has never sounded _wrong_ before, but in this girl's voice it falls flat.

"Wendy," He says, and knows it's right.

Wendy walks into the apartment on silent feet, toe to heel, like she's stepping across snapping twigs and rustling leaves rather than laminate, and smiles at him. There's madness in that smile, centuries of, and this is not a girl, this is a hurricane trapped inside a porcelain doll shell.

And then she hugs him, and he thinks that there's some girl left in there after all.

"You've been Henry Swan for a long time," She says, holds his hand and pushes something into it. "But it's time to wake up."

It's the vial from around her neck, purple dust nestled at the bottom, and when he looks up, Wendy's gone.

It sits on their table for two weeks. Their minds are made up, but they say goodbye to Boston first. Walk the streets Henry's finally no longer lost around, make pancakes in their kitchen, visit their diner one last time.

"Whatever happens, kid," His mom says, doesn't finish because she doesn't have to.

"Whatever happens," He nods, and unscrews the lid.

 


End file.
